My PhD research

My PhD was on Reconfigurable Distributed Computations. This project was about Worm Programs when it started (see the Guardian article below from 1986). By the end (1989) it was more specifically about adaptive parallelism on what became known as cloud computing - albeit on a very small scale; see the picture below in which I and Andrew Sherman are leaning against a cluster of about ten processor boards in a rack.

We created a platform, from kernel-up, for multi-segment programs called "reconfigurable distributed computations" which could re-structure and migrate themselves around whatever commodity hardware was available. We formed a start-up company based on venture capital to market the platform, which we called Equus. It wasn't particularly surprising to me that the company failed, given that this was the 1980s and we were a few people in the West End of London trying to sell an operating system - compare that with the tens of thousands behind Windows in Redmond.